Microteaches #8: Eye Of The Hurricane

This coming week is, for schools, half-term. For those of us brave souls who have decided to work in FE, there is no half-term, only a weird week of no exams, between the AS and A2 period. I've just caught my breath from the AS exams, only to go full-pelt into A2 in just over a week's time. And then it's all over for another year.


Like the eye of the hurricane, this is the oddly calm area sandwiched between two violent storms. So while I can, here are some links and thoughts.

Science

The video "The story of a single heartbeat", available from Understanding Life, should be required viewing for all A-level students looking at the heart.

If that's not enough, then just when they thought they were beginning to understand genetics, they should read this press release on gene modifications. And on the subject of genetics, they should look at Alby's post on Consanguinuity and the coefficient of relationship, which has relevance to much of Edexcel's Unit 2.

There was excitement in the entomology world a few months ago, when giant stick insects, thought to be extinct, were rediscovered on an isolated island. Students of mine who can't cope with the millipedes in the lab may not wish to look at the photos in this link. This is a great example of the role of zoos in captive breeding and reintroduction programmes.

Any students (or teachers for that matter) looking for cell biology images, would be advised to check out The Cell: An Image Library. That said, much of what I teach them at A-level and BTEC is a massive simplification, or a model, of what is actually happening in the cell. For example, mitosis is way more complicated than my A-level students think. And I genuinely had no idea that cells shut down during cell division.

There's a sweet illustrated guide to the evolution of different skin colours, which is a little simplified for A-level, but a nice introduction nevertheless. On our evolution, there's another hypothesis on why we walk upright.

Teaching

It's one of the most stressful times of the year for teachers, and certainly for their students, so it is good to be reminded of the physiology and treatment of stress, by Informed Education.

Putting into perspective my own success and progression rates, it is a timely reminder that, according to this DfE report on progression, in FE colleges, only 55% of AS biology students progress to A2.

For my students who are feeling demotivated, and worried that they are going to be outperformed by independent school students, there is research indicating that state school students actually do better in their university exams. Your time will come, my darlings.

I'll be trying to shake off the image of Cambridge as a toff's playground when I take four of my finest to the Cambridge open day in July. Nothing will make me prouder than being able to show off my students at my alma mater. I've even found my CAM Card...

Finally, I'm reassured by this post on being the "right kind of science role model" by Marie-Claire Shanahan. As a teacher I have a worrying amount of influence on my students. None of them want to be FE biology lecturers any time soon, but occasionally I get a breakthrough. It is a comfort that I am helping by engaging with them, discussing careers and being open about gender differences in the sciences. I'm probably helping more than my (male) physics lecturer colleague who declares that "biology is for women".

Microteaches #7: I Thought Half-Term Was A Holiday?

Half-term was last week. I thought I'd have a bit of a break, some time to lie in. Didn't happen. We had an action-packed few days celebrating my birthday, and there were builders in renovating the flats upstairs, which consisted of drilling and hammering very loudly from 8am. There was a frisson of excitement as they managed to drop a heating pipe through our ceiling on my birthday itself, and that of course was it - it was impossible to relax when wondering if any more hardware was going to pitch itself into our flat. I'm so tired that I feel like Steve.


Pissing me off massively during half-term was the article in the Indy stating "Female teachers accused of giving boys lower marks". The paper itself is available here. Sadly I don't understand enough of the statistical metrics, and indeed didn't have much time to read in detail, to be able to comment much beyond the executive summary. But the basic gist seemed to be that boys assume that their work will be marked lower by female teachers so they don't try as hard. Girls assume their work will be marked higher by male teachers so they try harder. And while female teachers confirm the boys' beliefs by marking girls more leniently, the male teachers mark boys more leniently.

So what is going on there? I don't feel that I do mark boys' work more harshly. I sometimes think I do the exact opposite. Male colleagues of mine are exceptionally hard on the boys, and on many occasions I've had blazing rows with them to try to save my boys' places on courses. If anything I allow boys more leniency than girls to compensate for my colleagues. I am but a single data point though. And to be fair, my style of teaching mostly involves revealing increments of cleavage in return for coursework.


Professional Pob impersonator and all-round fucking moron Michael Gove has delivered another slap in the face to teachers by saying "If you [teachers] love your job then there is, I think, absolutely nothing to complain about in making sure you have more of a chance to do it well" (from Huffington Post). This is in the context of expecting us to stay longer during the day and take shorter holidays.

Well, Govey, this week went as follows. On each morning I've been in at 8am - this is the earliest I am allowed to enter the premises. If I could go in at 7:30am I would. On Monday I left at 6:30pm when the college shut. On Tuesday I left at 8:45pm, yesterday at 7:45pm and this evening I ducked out early at 7pm. Tomorrow is a training day so I might get to leave at 5pm. Twelve-hour days are nothing unusual. On Tuesday and Wednesday I had to sit down at my laptop when I got home and work for another three hours. During half-term most of us went into work on at least one day of our holiday, and I will have three days taken out of my Easter break for revision purposes. So I would like very much to know what more Gove would like me to do.

This term is all about coursework, and my A2s are starting to complain that they're not doing fieldwork. They were the ones who moaned like buggery about having to do so, and now they're having to live with doing lab-based research projects. It's going to be an absolute disaster. The AS students are doing better, and some of the more interesting topics I've seen are on ageing, cirrhosis of the liver, Kawasaki disease, conservation of gorillas, testicular cancer and equine colic. We're going on a trip next week, so if you hear that a constituent college of the University of London out in Surrey has burnt to the ground, you'll know that was my lot. I predict it will be a matter of minutes after the coach pulls out of our car park before the strains of "Stop the bus I want a wee-wee" are heard...

FML.

Microteaches #6: What Day Is It?

I don't remember being so tired coming into the first half-term of the year before. I've had to be reminded several times this week what day it is. As I went into college on Monday to do some marking, Tuesday felt like Saturday. Today felt like a weird hybrid of Saturday and Sunday. And now half-term is nearly over. Meh.


So here's some of the stuff I've been favouriting (watch the English teacher I'm married to cringing at the imaginary word...) on Twitter and in my feeds.

There's an uplifting report on women's progress in STEM, reported in the Huffington Post. I'm not overly impressed by the image used to illustrate it - blue liquid in a graduated test tube, being held by a beautifully manicured finger that is no doubt wholly impractical for the majority of scientific lab work.

However, the positive aspect of the HuffPo article is tempered by a LinkedIn study reported in Jezebel that one in five professional women have never had a professional mentor, let alone a female one. Might I still be in academia if I had? Maybe. I know that the day one female professor came to find me, told me she could see I was suffering from depression and that she was taking me for a coffee and a damn good chat was one of the brightest moments of my whole dismal experience in St Louis.

I don't have to enforce a uniform, thank FSM. I know muggins would end up being the one volunteered to tell the girls their skirts were so short one could see what they'd had for breakfast. According to the Torygraph, schools are increasingly banning skirts in favour of trousers to ensure girls don't look like ladies of negotiable affection and incur the interest of prospective rapists. Yeah, right, because no schoolgirl wearing trousers has ever been raped. I remember there being quite a to-do about whether we got to wear trousers at school. My mum, as the wife of one of the deputy heads, went up against the headmaster's wife, and won - trousers became part of the uniform. Didn't stop my chemistry teacher writing up on the board at the start of the lesson:

Sure, dress your lower limbs in pants;
Yours are the legs, my sweeting.
You look divine as you advance...
Have you seen yourself retreating?
Turns out a large number of the young people caught rioting in August were in receipt of free school meals and/or on the special educational needs register. And yet we're facing the deepest education cuts since the 1950s. Something doesn't quite add up - probably the budget-holder at the Department for Education.

Some oddly familiar psychadelic images from science textbooks have been dug up. Is it any wonder all us biology teachers are a bit weird?

Creationism continues to loom, though I am heartened that the OCR A-level Biology specification quotes Theodosius Dobzhansky (I want to move exam boards for A-level). There is a call for more stringent guidelines on teaching creationism. There may be reason for optimism in the face of Muslim opinion on evolution - this is something I'm following closely, as I'm very much hoping to write up my PGCE research as a paper.


Finally, Kevin Zelnio has issued a call to arms on evolutionary biology and viral marketing - the last thing we want is for creationist websites to be the top hits on Google!

Microteaches #5: Back In The Jug Agane

I'm determined to bash something out for the blog before teaching starts tomorrow. I couldn't think of anything suitably moving. I felt envious of The Learning Spy's department - his colleagues seemed a lot keener to embrace new technologies and to genuinely improve learning. Whereas I'm the only one in mine who knows what a QR code is. That's going to be an uphill struggle. I want to use them to put links to websites, facts and trivia, exam tips and videos around the labs for students to seek out. As an incentive I might even put the answers to the first AS Biology test up there.


For all the newness and shininess of a brand new building and lab, there are still snags. The skylight in the forensics lab is amazing and it's so bright and clean-looking in there. However, it's impossible to see the IWB. So I'm crippled in there, forced to resort to regular whiteboard and pens until they figure out how to put a horizontal blind across.

But I'm still really looking forward to teaching again. I met the new AS groups last week, and can't wait to get to know them properly. Each year I have relied on the ease and joy of teaching the A2 class to cancel out any bad bits. I've not seen many of the incoming A2 class yet, and as it's a class fed in from the two AS classes last year, there are still some students I've never taught before. They've got some big shoes to fill, as the classes of 2010 and 2011 were brilliant. They'll probably manage it.

This year I am less prepared than I have ever been for classes in terms of formal paperwork. Of my five hours' teaching tomorrow, two hours are going to be nothing more than getting to know the groups and handing out the assignment sheets. I have a practical to do with one group of students after that, then there are still some induction activities going on. Broadband conked out today for a bit, so I haven't done as much work as I wanted to. The good news is, lesson plans are overrated, and I can demonstrate that I have planned my lessons (the lab technicians looked at my requests for this week like I'd just given them each £500).

So the Year 1 forensic science students will be learning about the scientific method and the nature of science. There are some awesome ideas about it, many of which focus on evolution, so we can talk about what a theory really is. The Year 2 applied science students will be hacking away at a kidney later in the week, but they will be nervous about having a unit on plant sciences to study later in the year. Maybe they'll take a bit of notice if I give them some of the important questions that plant science may be able to answer. They might also get put off animal sciences when we do the physiology of the nervous system and muscle contraction, which I intend to demonstrate thus:


The AS students will be asked to help with @teachingofsci's exit questionnaire, to which I have assigned a shorter URL of bit.ly/physicsQ, as they'll never remember the full URL. We had a lot of students take physics this year - enough for two groups at long last - so we might not have so many non-physicists, but it's worth a go.

I'm looking for CPD. I'm going to see if I can extract some money to go to the ASE 2012 conference (hey, they'd have paid for me to go to Las Vegas for SVP, so they'd better pay for me to go to Liverpool!). I'm going to try to be more involved in the two blog carnivals I love most: Scientiae and the Accretionary Wedge. This is of course if the management lay off the Trial By Ordeal daily meeting regime of the past fortnight. I'll be taking Tom Bennett's School Bullshit Bingo card into the next meeting with me. The phrase "sharing best practice" is like fingernails down a blackboard. I have no problem with the action it signifies, but the phrase sucks.

See you in October, I guess...

Microteaches #4: Already Bored

I've been off for ten days now, and the weather has rewarded my year's hard work with rain - all my grand plans for reading in the garden, going out on day trips and doing a lot of catching rays are on hold until Britain remembers that it's fucking summer and is supposed to be warm. The weather picked up nicely on Friday, when I picked up Chris from Highly Allochthonous from the airport and took him for beer and sausages - I think we went through a full reminiscence of every lecturer we'd had in Cambridge Earth Sciences.

There's a new site called Instagrok, which markets itself as a search engine for educational materials. I'm quite taken by the idea of having the more commercial sites discounted from my searches, so I'll be trying it out over the holiday.

Clearing some of my starred feed items, my husband shared this little gem courtesy of The Onion:


I like the satires about fundamentalism and creationism that involve the other students objecting. Sometimes it feels like it's only the teachers complaining about anti-evolution sentiments in the biology classroom, but it's worth remembering that there are a lot of students who want to learn the science, as Doonesbury demonstrates:


On the subject of inspiring students overcoming the odds to study, the Mary Sue ran a feature on Sada Mire, the only active Somali archaeologist in the world. One of my Somali students is really keen on anthropology, and somehow I have got to get her to meet Dr Mire as soon as possible.

I'm on a bit of a women-in-science binge, to prepare for my additional role next year as the chair of our Women In Science committee, and may well have more to say about this, but I noted this press release reported on Labspaces. We have a long way to go, ladies!

I'll be using this XKCD cartoon in my classes when we have to look at correlation and causation:


And I'll finish off with something that will make the former students who read my blog snigger like they're still at school (bonus points guys if you download and read the paper!): "Immune Activation Reduces Sperm Quality in the Great Tit". Don't say I don't give you interesting articles to read!

Microteaches #3: A-Level Exams Begin

AS Biology is the first exam of the season, and it's happening on Monday. Precisely 0% of my students showed up to the final class before the exams, so I hope the little sods were all at home busily revising.

Maybe they'd find this video, linked from Seven Deadly Synapses, useful for reading pedigrees:


My A2s will be leaving by 10th June, and I wanted to get them something to remember me by. They've been a small group (no more than 10 students) and we've all got to know each other well (they were the darlings that pretended I was their adoptive mother to get free cake at Nandos). So I bought them each a copy of "Do We Need Pandas?" - the crapness of pandas has been something of a running joke throughout the year. And in each copy, I wrote the same words my A-Level biology teacher wrote to me 13 years ago:


Myosotis arvensis should sum up my message to them quite nicely...

I submitted my abstract for this year's SVP meeting in Las Vegas: "Teaching Evolution To Diverse Groups Of Students: Opportunities And Threats". I've put it down for the E&O Poster Session - really hope it gets accepted. It's formed part of my PGCE course this year, so I'll have a short paper to around the time of the conference itself.

On the subject of conferences, if this is what climate scientists get up to when they all meet up then it's clear that SVP need to up their game:

Microteaches #2: Easter Blitherings

Term ended on Friday. I could (should?) have gone down the pub and faceplanted into a pint or eight, but even that was too much hard work, so I sat in the garden, had two margaritas then decamped to Nando's.

It's been revision for the A-level students this week, so I didn't get much relaxation over the weekend, but yesterday was officially the first day of my holidays. My intellectual capacity deteriorated so much since I left college on Tuesday, that I wrote 7 + 5 = 15 when tutoring yesterday afternoon. Fortunately my GCSE student was equally exhausted, so he didn't mock me too much.


More depressing is the students' lack of numeracy skills - there have been some issues over how to calculate means and percentage increases... I have made a note to go over some of this basic maths for biologists before their exams, or they will be, to use the technical term, fucked.

Teachers in the UK have been frothing at the mouth (or switching off the television) at Jamie's Dream School, where the Rubber-Lipped Twat^TM decides he wants to run a school for "kids wot the system's let down innit", or words to that effect.

On the one hand, it has been really good for non-teaching viewers to see what the little darlings can be like (I have some approaching that level of disruption, but they can all be counted on the fingers of one hand, and the moment they decide to channel Harlem, they'll be OUT!). On the other hand, I can't help looking over my shoulder in case Pob Michael Gove decides to replace us all with dodgy celebs. Would my "Physiology of Human Regulation and Reproduction" classes be more informative if Kinga from Big Brother taught them perhaps?!

For some really superb analysis, check out posts from The Behaviour Guru - Tom Bennett's descriptions of each episode have been some of the few things I have read aloud to Paul recently (Doctor Grumpy being another).


In other news, Jabba is in excellent health, and absolutely adores his palm tree. I think perhaps he's been listening to too much Jimmy Buffett.

Microteaches #1: February Half-Term

Bloody typical. I spend all this time putting together a post on GCSE Biology teaching specifications, and they all go and change it! Well, actually I did know about this, but at the time, and until the end of this academic year, there will be students examined under the old specification. The good news for you and me is that the specifications have not changed very much at all - I'll get up a revised post sometime soon. Anyway, here are some mini-bits that don't quite make up a full blog post, for your reading pleasure.

Mike Keesey has launched Phylopic, a resource with silhouette images for anyone who might need them in their phylogenies. It's wonderful to see these, and I hope many more people contribute. Best of all, from my perspective, is that they are on a clear rather than white background, so I can put them into my teaching slides without having to edit the backgrounds out. Not every organism is so easily converted to silhouette though (amoebas and bacteria...):

  
In reference to last week's highlight of AQA GCSE Fail, there have been some follow-ups. My post hit the Bad Science forum, probably as a result of being included on Ed Yong's Missing Links post. I've since seen that the New Humanist picked up on this, and managed to extract from AQA confirmation that future exams will not contain anything on creationism or intelligent design. I should bloody well hope so.

But AQA aren't off the hook yet: the bar-stewards discovered a marking error in some of their A-Level exams on 17 September 2010, but didn't think to notify Ofqual or UCAS until 30 September 2010. UCAS Clearing ended on 20 September 2010. Over 600 scripts were incorrectly marked, for GCSE, AS and A2, and this resulted in 13 A2 students not being able to get their first choice of university due to missing the grades (which they subsequently received), and not being able to do anything about it because UCAS didn't know until 10 days after places were no longer available for the 2010-2011 year.

In more palaeontological news, there is a new species of sauropod dinosaur, Brontomerus mcintoshi^[*]. Now that we have "Thunder Thighs", I wonder if there'll be any more dinosaurs springing up with the other cruel nicknames I had as a child... They're currently getting a good deal of publicity, although as Dave Hone predicts, there'll no doubt be a load of inaccurate references to Brontosaurus.

Currently not getting any publicity at the moment is a paper linking sex, climate change and dinosaur extinction^[*]. You'd think the redtops would be all over this like a rash. I have only skimmed the paper so far, but I am intrigued by a possible issue regarding genetic sex determination (GSD) and temperature-dependent sex determination (TSD). For this to be a plausible mechanism, I would presume it would have to be shown that most, if not all, GSD species survived (not simply birds and mammals), and that most, if not all, TSD species died at the end of the Cretaceous. Rising global temperatures could have a rather major effect on TSD species, but one wonders if perhaps parthenogenesis as demonstrated in a number of reptiles could have countered this in the past.

Right, students - consider this your homework (in addition to the rest of it) - go read Silber's paper and come back and report on your views of its plausibility.

Finally, this has been amusing and appalling the kids in equal measure this week:


Following the theme I shall be attending the NHM After Hours event this Friday, visiting the Sexual Nature exhibit and the Let's Talk About Sex talk. I'm contemplating taking the AS Biologists to the Sexual Nature exhibit, so I'm off to scout it out to see if the little buggers are mature enough to deal with the contents...

^[*]Silber, Sherman J. 2011. Human male infertility, the Y chromosome, and dinosaur extinction. Middle East Fertility Society Journal, [In Press], Corrected Proof, Available online 17 February 2011, ISSN 1110-5690, DOI: 10.1016/j.mefs.2011.01.001
^[*]Taylor, Michael P., Mathew J. Wedel and Richard L. Cifelli. 2011. Brontomerus mcintoshi, a new sauropod dinosaur from the Lower Cretaceous Cedar Mountain Formation, Utah, USA. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica 56(1):75-98. doi: 10.4202/app.2010.0073